32 comments:

Ah, well, you see the bridge represents a cliff edge, which is what Hammond, the BBC and their Remainiac chums believe we'll be jumping off if there's a hard Brexit. The Beeb would have used a proper cliff edge, but they can't afford one now they're going to have to pay their biased female reporters and presenters as much as their biased male ones.

No, You're both wrong! This is Merkel Duck taking her brood of EU ducklings, going with the flow - of left of centre liberalism (symbolised by the river of destiny), whilst the UK watches, camera in hand, from strong and stable platform.

BBC keen to repeat the Police's advice that this was not a terrorist incident (even though they don't know what the motive was!)...strange how they don't accept Police statements in other circumstances but they do when it's a machine gun attack on a club by someone from Iraq.

Nobody seems to be reporting that. Either no witnesses have said he was shouting the usual "Muslim benediction", or the German authorities are trying to suppress it. Must be an election on or something.

Because there's no Marr or Sunday Politics on today, out of sheer masochism I had a quick look at the Sunday Morning Live, which has replaced Nicky Cambpell's shouting mob show.

The only segment I watched was the first one about the 'morning after pill'. The agenda was clear: this is not an abortion. As it's not an abortion, the BBC is free and clear to try and put pressure on Boots to lower their price.

The panel was 2 for vs 2 against, although the presenter Sean Fletcher clearly took the side of the pro-pill advocates. One of the panelists presented it as a completely normal, everyday experience for women to need to use this. Objections were smacked down by Fletcher because the show wasn't supposed to be as debate on abortion. In fact, the agenda was that this is not an abortion, so even the right-wing patriarchy moralists can't have any valid objections.

When one panelist tried to make the case that selling this as a normal, everyday act only encourages more unprotected sex, he was shouted down.

Nobody wondered about an increase in sexually transmitted diseases. The focus was all from the advocate's perspective: this is about women's health and women's reproductive rights. Nothing else matters.

"It's a good way of avoiding unwanted pregnancies" was his message, repeated over and over.

Fortunately, Die Walküre starts in about half an hour, so I can forget all about this drivel.

Sean Fletcher definitely took sides. And there was also the bit where a third 'for' was interviewed, introduced as a "medical expert" and asked to give "the clinical view" on the "claim" made by the panellist. After he refuted that abortion "claim", Emma Barnett repeated "So that's the clinical view of that", and she ended that section by saying again, "Thank you for that insight and the clinical definition of what this bill does". There was little doubt where she stood on the matter either.

Obviously Sieglinde was impregnated against her wishes, brainwashed and forced into it by men. She might have been able to take the pill except the local healer charged to much for it.

In any case, so far it's better than last year. Same with Das Rheingold. Janowski seems mostly to have worked out the balance problems he had the first time. Mostly. He still lets the orchestra volume get away from him at times.

But I can only imagine how stupid it must seem when they're talking about the sword stuck in the tree - a familiar myth symbol - and the prop they're using is a @#%^ing AK-47.

Technical hitch? - I'm all in favour of changing the open thread video/photo from time-to-time, but only after closing the previous thread! To change the video while leaving previous comments in place makes it look as though the 1st four commenters are losing the plot!

Every year our cultural guardian, the BBC, through the proms promotes the giants of British musical composition such as Elgar, Vaughan Williams and Britten, to name a few.

Made me think though...by contrast the BBC appears to have given up on Shakespeare entirely. You would think the state-funded national broadcaster might feel it had some sort of cultural duty to preserve and promote Shakespeare's legacy. But no. Maybe there's stuff on Radio 3 but virtually nothing mainstream as far as I can see.

Could it be that the BBC's PC sensibilities are offended by just about every play and sonnet. If it's not racist or sexist or nationalistic, it's finding transgendering incredibly funny.

I think your observations are spot-on Monkey Brains. I would add to your last paragraph that Shakespeare's English , itself, is becoming increasingly difficult for young people, particularly those from ethnic minorities, to understand - and whom does the BBC care about the most?...

As soon as they can work out casting for an all-Black and Asian cast, and update the stories to include relevant contemporary Progressive shibboleths, Shakespeare will be back on the menu. Transgender Hamlet, Homosexual Romeo and Juliet, Muslim Shylock, Reverse the MacBeth gender roles, job done.

At lunchtime today (Monday) I tried to listen to Radio 4. The login has changed and I now have to register without the option of doing it later. Rather than giving Big Aunty my details, I have found a way round the problem. http://onlineradiobox.com/ lets you listen live.

There was an update to the BBC player on Android the other day. The additional permissions sought by the BBC led me to remove the App for privacy reasons. Too bad I still have to pay for it in TV tax even though I won't use the App that snoops.

Just catching up on the Proms, and here's another anti-Brexit, pro-EU moment. James MacMillan's European Requiem was performed yesterday. Yes, 100% pro-EU. I will just reproduce the listing on CultureWhisper:

Sir James MacMillan mourns the death of ever closer union in his musical riposte to Brexit, plus, in his Ninth Symphony, Beethoven’s Ode To Joy

With the EU anthem programmed with it. This could not be a more blatant bit of anti-Brexit programming.

James MacMillan’s European Requiem was commissioned by a festival in Oregon before the Brexit vote, and first performed there in February 2016, but its European premiere at this Prom will be highly charged, given its theme of a unified Europe.

Highly charged with anti-Brexit bias, which the BBC keeps denying. There's no denying it now.

‘Latin for me represents the common European language that existed before nationalist barriers were erected,’ he explains. ‘It was the lingua franca used by the European founding fathers… and provided a source of common identity for a millennium and a half, in international relations, education and the sharing of ideas.

Quite in synch with Barenboim's little condescending lecture.

You can bet this was programmed, schedules hastily rearranged, on June 24 of last year. Deliberate anti-Brexit, pro-EU bias.

BBC Breakfast this morning at 0740ish a campaigner was being interviewed and made a statement to the effect of 'if A is done B will happen'.

What got my goat was that the statement went completely unchallenged. If the BBC has any ambition to present itself as impartial it must try harder. The BBC currently appears to promote views as if it were a privately owned newspaper.

From Alan at BBBC: https://biasedbbc.org/blog/2017/08/01/the-clearest-possible-threat-to-our-society/#comments

I haven't seen this opinion on the pages of ITBBCB?, but we should note its relevance. The idea of allowing or actively promoting fierce debate (but only within limits as defined by the BBC) is what 'sticking to the narrative' is all about. Under the guise of free speech, what we are actually hearing is carefully controlled free speech, which isn't free at all.

Bias includes a whole range of techniques: outirght censorship (BBC didn't report on the Cologne New Year's Eve outrages for 5 days despite having a Germany-based correspondent), fake news (false narratives e.g. about innocent drug dealers cruelly despatched by oppressive Police - rarely borne out by the facts), controlling debate parameters, technical hitches, studio setting (I noted during the Referendum campaign how often the BBC had Remainers in authoritative setting likes their studies at home , or in the studio whereas Leavers more often were interviewed out on the street or in a regional studio)... the list goes on...agenda prioritisation, misrepresentation of opinions, factual omissions (who was actually throwing the missiles?), irrelevant detail, opinion spin ("controversial" is only ever applied to things the BBC doesn't like...things it likes which are controversial are "groundbreaking" or "innovative" or "brave"),incorporating approved political propaganda and wish fulfilment into soaps, drama and lifestyle programming, language control (you will no longer hear "bogus asylum seekers" or "illegal immigrants").

The BBC is only too happy to go on about the "weak" position of the UK in the EU exit negotiations but they rarely reports on the pressure Germany is under. The bill for Merkel's migrants is now more than 20 billion Euros per annum and rising all the time.

20 billion is a lot of money - over 600 Euros per household in terms of additional expenditure (and remember these migrants are largely economically inactive). Germany will pick up the lion's share of the 10 billion per annum we won't be contributing after we leave. They are desperate for our cash injection because their migrant bill is going to rise.

Incidentally the 20 billion is probably an underestimate not taking account of increased police and security costs or the impact on housing costs through increased competition for housing resources.

We are back to the Merkel Duck leading her EU brood to who knows where - with finances that look fallible without the UK's massive annual contribution. There's something to be said for distancing the UK and watching from a strong and stable platform as the rest of the EU head for the black hole.

It also doesn't take into account the ever-increasing cost of dealing with the sexual assaults, violence, and terrorism perpetrated by 'refugees'. Increased security costs aside, it costs money and man-hours to respond, compensate, treat victims, clean up, etc.

A correction to my comment above about the Proms and James MacMillan's European Requiem.

Damien Thompson wrote in this week's Spectator that the piece is actually a lament of the loss of a Christian Europe. This fits in with MacMillan's muscular, devout Catholicism, but I had my doubts based on the quotes from the CultureWhisper piece. However, Thompson mentioned MacMillan's Twitter account, and I checked it out.

The composer supports Thompson's interpretation that, in their eager lust to program an anti-Brexit piece, they accidentally put on a subversive political statement instead.

https://twitter.com/jamesmacm/status/893064343050493952

I'm happy to stand corrected about the composer and the piece itself. But this only confirms that the BBC has for the third time deliberately had an anti-Brexit statement in the program, despite their insistence that they do no such thing.